William MacAskill: belief

Transcript context

…Why not? If you look at hedonistic utility, if you have more people who are not at repugnant conclusion margins, you’d have somewhat more people, not that many more, right? I think a few things. The first is, if you think that it’s good to have more happy, flourishing people — and I think if people have sufficiently good lives, then that’s true. I argue for that in What We Owe the Future. Then, by far, by overwhelming amounts, the focus should be on how many people might exist in the future rather than now, where perhaps you have a really good fertility program, and you can increase the world population by 10 percent. That’s like an extra billion people or so. But the loss of future life and future very good life if we go extinct — that’s being measured in the trillions upon trillions of lives. The question of just how many people should be alive today is really driven by, how would that impact the long-term flourishing of humanity? That being said, like all things considered, I think there’s this norm, there’s this idea at the moment that it’s bad to have kids because of the carbon footprint. I think that only looks at one side of the ledger. Yes, people emit carbon dioxide, and that has negative effects, but they also do a lot of good things. They innovate, and there’s an intrinsic benefit too. They have happy lives. Well, if you can bring up people to live good lives, then they will flourish, and that’s making the world better. They also might be moral changemakers, and so on. But then, the question — even suppose you think, “Okay, yes, larger family sizes are good,” the best way of achieving that — it would seem very unlikely, to me, that banning abortion, or more like very heavily restricting women’s reproductive rights, is the best way of going about that. It doesn’t have to be the best way of achieving that. It might be this 37th-best way, but if it were still positive expected utility value — at least in your framework, you’re fine with subsidizing births, right?…

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